Greetings, stargazers.
Welcome to a Friday column. Maybe reading on a new day will get you started on some weekend observing activities when most people have a bit more time.
I hope you have gotten to watch some of the reports from the Artemis II mission as the Orion spacecraft named Integrity loops around the moon. As I am writing this, the capsule with astronauts Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen is on the way, but hasn’t quite gotten around the moon yet. I find the mission very exciting but am somewhat disappointed in the lack of mainstream media headline coverage so far. At least NASA has a YouTube page. I might be showing my age, but I miss the three-network livestreams during parts of the Apollo missions. (Apparently, there are a few other things going on in the world right now.)
Useful links
Artemis II NASA updates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3kR2KK8TEs
Comet C1/2026 A1 (MAPS) disintegration
Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS)
Astronomy picture of the day
An Astronomer’s forecast for Durango
Old Fort Lewis Observatory
http://www.fortlewis.edu/observatory
hakes_c@fortlewis.edu
For those of you with telescopes, this is galaxy season. The region of the sky around Leo, Virgo and Coma Bernices has numerous galaxies that are easily visible. A detailed star chart is essential for finding and correctly identifying these galaxies, because none of them are visible to your naked eye, and very few are visible through binoculars.
There are two nice groupings of galaxies to look for in Leo. M95, M96 and M105 are set below the Lion’s belly. They are all within 3 degrees of each other but may not be quite close enough together to be in the same telescopic field of view. Below the tail of Leo, M66, M65 and NGC 3628 make up the Leo Triplet, a much tighter grouping.
Following Leo in a large region to the east is the Virgo cluster of galaxies. A small telescope can let you see scores of these galaxies, but unless you have lots of practice, it is difficult to tell which is which. Even if you can’t tell them apart, it is fun to see things more than 50 million light years away. The elliptical galaxy M87 is the brightest one near the center of this cluster.
M64, the Black Eye galaxy in Coma Berenices, and M104, the Sombrero galaxy to the south of Virgo, both make excellent targets for small telescopes, because they are relatively bright and have distinguishing dark dust lanes.
The constellation Leo can be found most easily by looking for the backwards question mark, called the sickle, with the bright star Regulus as the dot underneath. If you are familiar with the pointer stars in the Big Dipper – the two stars at the end of the dipper that point toward Polaris – you can use these same two stars but go in the opposite direction to get to Leo. Algieba, a little higher up in the sickle from Regulus, is a good double star for a small telescope. The two stars in the double are about 1 magnitude apart in brightness, so can provide a pleasing view.
Venus is the prominent evening star once again. It is hard to miss in the western sky after sunset. Jupiter is higher in the southwestern sky and as always makes a great target through either binoculars or telescopes.
There had been prediction that the recently discovered Comet C1/2026 A1 (MAPS) could be quite spectacular in the first half of April. Unfortunately for viewers, it vaporized as it got too close to the sun. A different comet, C/2026 R3 (PanSTARRS), is barely visible through binoculars in the early morning as it now approaches the sun for an April 19 perihelion. After that it has a chance to become naked-eye bright in the early evening sky. However, I expect it will be challenging to see because it will be close to the horizon as well as close to the sun.
The Lyrid meteor shower peaks on the night of April 22.
Charles Hakes teaches in the physics and engineering department at Fort Lewis College and is the director of the Fort Lewis Observatory.
